It's All About Fun

January 11, 2002|By Nick Sortal Staff Writer

Terry Hart doesn't expect her children to be the next Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. But her 4-year-old twins, Joely and Ryan, are bouncing balls and swinging rubber bats in the city gymnasium with a teacher nearby.

In another city, with another teacher, Matthew Fried, 4, listens carefully during a class in a park. He quietly holds a large rubber ball while the teacher explains the fine art of dribbling to Matthew and the other youngsters.

Such classes are booming throughout South Florida. Parents want their preschool children to develop the exercise habit early in life and they see the self-esteem their young ones gain as their coordination improves. The organized classes have taken children's activities well beyond the play stage.

"A class like this helps them develop a healthy attitude toward sports, plus they have another adult teaching them," said Hart, whose twins participate in the Start Smart class conducted in the gymnasium at Pembroke Shores Park in Pembroke Pines. "There's just so many positives to it."

Matthew Fried takes a class called Kidokinetics, which is offered throughout South Florida.

"If they can improve their fine-motor skills and coordination, it's going to help their confidence, too," said Matthew's mother, Leslie Fried, as the youngster exercised during a class at the Broward County Regional Park at Weston.

A third class, Playball Inc., also gets kids up and running without the pressure of teammates or parents keeping score.

The classes, which are conducted throughout Broward, are popular with parents and attract a population niche most cities are just touching on. And the parents carry reduced expectations: no one sees the dollar signs or glory of professional sports two decades down the road. It's about playing and having fun.

"The big thing is that they don't experience peer pressure," said Playball director Lionel Anderson. "A kid will go to, say, soccer and feel inferior. Then you've lost that kid to that sport forever.

"We're trying to pre-empt that, to give them the skills that build their self-confidence. It's important that it be unintimidating because when you go into organized sports, it's often the opposite."

The increase in activities for preschoolers might, in part, be a backlash to the relative lack of physical education in schools. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children and adolescents "engage in three or more sessions a week of activities that last 20 minutes or more and require moderate to vigorous levels of exertion." But most schools have scaled back on PE at the same time they have revved up class time spent preparing for standardized academic tests.

The noncompetitive aspect of play classes appeals to Dominic Callahan, a Coral Springs child psychologist.

"It sounds like a very healthy response to what we all know to be true, which is that children are subjected to competition and evaluation way before they can work with that in a healthy way," Callahan said. "They quickly become little performers and they wind up being very hard on themselves as adults based on a childhood where they were trying to measure up.

"This sounds like a way to rectify it by just enjoying their bodies and having fun," he said. "Plus, it gets them away from the passive existence in front of an electronic altar."

Julie Griffis of Pembroke Pines, whose 3-year-old son, Garrett, participates in Start Smart, said having her son learn basic skills has been the right way to introduce him to physical activities.

"At first, it was hard getting him to play games, but now he'll grab a bat and go outside and hit the ball," she said. "He's enjoying himself."